


avenue of the giants

by kosy



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Camping, Established Relationship, F/F, Long Siesta, Post-Season/Series 11, rural northern california (emotion), they're in love and they're trying so hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:20:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29477601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: Dreamy can’t remember the last time she saw trees this big, but then again she also can’t remember the last time she paid attention to something like trees at all.
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Sutton Dreamy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	avenue of the giants

**Author's Note:**

> hey everyone! this is just another ficlet i wanted to get out before my next Project Tm. i love these two, et cetera. warnings for mentions of faulty memory and time weirdness, plus non-maincord-compliant swearing. i'm just many thoughts head full about sutton dreamy. enjoy!!

Dreamy can’t remember the last time she saw trees this big, but then again she also can’t remember the last time she paid attention to something like trees at all. Can’t remember the last time that was the sort of thing she was allowed to concentrate on and turn over in her head, something so mundane as a tree. But here they are lining the clearing anyway, vast enough that she has to crane her neck to really see them, vast enough to scratch at the stars. 

She gazes up at the few constellations she recognizes for as long as she can, dimmed by the light from the campfire, then back down at the flames when her neck starts to ache. Makes a conscious effort to relax her shoulders. The tension’s been draining out of her these past few years but slowly. Slowly. Which is more than she’d expected at the beginning of all this. 

Jaylen’s leaned up against her shoulder, their forearms pressed together on the overlapping armrests of the foldup camp chairs that they'd pushed close earlier. The unspoken want for proximity, a silent reminder. They’d talked all through dinner and the wine afterward, but they’re quiet here as they watch the fire. She doesn’t mind. 

She wonders if it still sets Jaylen on edge, the open flame. It must, after everything—God, it sets Dreamy on edge too—but she doesn’t ask. She’d seen the hard determination in Jaylen’s eyes as she’d lit the newspaper and kindling earlier, match flaring to life in her hand. The frustration that had pulled her mouth into a tight line when she’d flinched. 

She started the campfire herself in the end anyway, waving Dreamy off when she offered to help. Fine. When Jaylen decides she’s going to fight a battle alone, she fights it alone. It’s what it is. She’s learned to live with that. Unless she needs her, Dreamy won’t force her way in. Better that way. 

It's then that Jaylen shifts her hand to cover Dreamy’s, fingertips resting lightly on her knuckles. “What’re you thinking about?” 

She shrugs, which she figures is a true enough answer. Either way, speech feels unnatural after so long spent quiet, so she doesn’t try, just lets herself sink deeper into the silence. 

Jaylen nods like she understands anyway. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.” She might understand. Might not. Either is okay.

A few more minutes pass, quiet except for the crackle of the burning wood and the sound of Jaylen’s breath beside her. Not much noise from the rest of the campground. Mostly-deserted. It's late in the camping season. Late in the night too, probably, but Dreamy doesn't bother keeping track of time anymore, just assumes it’s running out. Hasn't so much as worn a watch in over a decade. 

Next to her, Jaylen tilts her head back to stare up, eyes wide and unblinking. Dreamy’s expecting her to say something about the stars but instead a smile tugs at the corners of Jaylen’s lips and she says, “Have you ever seen trees this big in your life?” 

Dreamy shifts in her chair to face her more fully. “No. You?” 

“No,” Jaylen murmurs, surprisingly soft. Borderline reverent as she looks up at those branches stretching into the dark. “Never been in this part of NorCal. Usually just flew over.”

“Redwoods, right?” They’d both seen them as they drove in, of course—the sudden shift from grassland and hills and deciduous trees to the mountains with their evergreens as they trundled up the coast in Jaylen’s old Chevy. 

At that point, though, Dreamy had been preoccupied with making fun of Jaylen’s road trip playlist and grabbing the safety handle whenever Jaylen took a turn too fast (frequent occurrence) and mentally double-checking that they’d packed everything, not so much staring out the window. And then they'd been choosing a campground to stop in and pitching a tent and figuring out how to cook something over a campfire and eating and keeping the fire burning, and there didn’t seem to be any time to stop and stare at the trees. Too used to operating on an unforgiving clock.

Jaylen hums in affirmation. “Avenue of the Giants.” The name of the highway: a scenic route off the 101 winding through miles of old growth forest. They aren’t going anywhere other than the vague concept of “north”, and they have no deadlines for years, as far as they know. They can afford the detour.

“Right,” she breathes, and she looks at the trees too, or what she can see of them in the firelight. It feels wrong to talk louder than a whisper, like screaming in a cathedral, so she keeps her voice hushed. “Do you know how old these things are?” 

“Old,” she says dryly, grinning into the sky for a second before her expression fades back into reflection. “I mean, they’re so...” She trails off.

They’re so  _ big. _ Which goes without saying, obviously—redwoods are the largest trees in the world and they’d known that before now, but knowing something like that in the abstract was entirely different from seeing these behemoths in person and measuring your small body against theirs. This leftover megafauna, detritus from before humanity was so much as a blip on the planet’s radar. 

Dreamy won’t call it holy because in this world the holy is as good as dead the moment it shows its face. Most people here have the blood of gods on their hands. The songs will tell you that gods don’t bleed, but the songs are wrong about that. The songs are wrong about a lot of things. 

The tallest tree in the world is somewhere near here, kept hidden from the public for exactly that reason. Hyperion. It’s three hundred and eighty feet tall, anywhere from six hundred to nine hundred years old, and who knows how much longer it’ll grow on in secret.  It isn’t the oldest, though, not even close; those stretch back millennia before a world like this was even imagined. Floods and logging and earthquakes and windstorms and wildfires and still nothing managed to kill them. Even the deadwood stands as monument, never disappeared completely.

“Wish there were a way to know for sure,” Dreamy murmurs, and Jaylen looks over at her. 

“Hm?” 

She shrugs, fidgets with the cuff of her sweatshirt. “To know how old they are.”    


“You just count the rings, right?” 

“Yes, but that isn’t exact.” 

Jaylen’s brows furrow. “It’s not?”    


“I don’t know. I assume not, given that all the tree ages I’ve ever seen are estimates,” she says. 

She laughs. “How often are you looking at tree ages?” 

“I don’t know. More often than you, clearly,” Dreamy says, and Jaylen grins, nudging the toe of her shoe against Dreamy’s. 

“Then I guess you’re more qualified than me to say.” 

“What else is new,” she mutters, which gets another laugh out of Jaylen. “Besides, I imagine it’s difficult to get an exact count without killing the tree.” 

“Makes sense,” Jaylen says. “That does sorta sound like it’d defeat the purpose.” 

Dreamy snorts. “It kind of would, yeah.” A brief contemplative silence. “Though I guess it doesn’t matter too much in the end.”

Jaylen tilts her head. “What d’you mean?”

“Time’s weird anyway, right? It’s—I don’t—” She draws in a slow breath. “I don’t remember much from before blaseball. I don’t know how much I’m losing here, what’s slipped through the cracks. I don’t think anyone could. But even ignoring that, the siesta makes the years warp, and the years are—I mean, we’re missing so much of life, Jay, regular life, even if we aren’t aging. I feel like I just—stopped, somewhere in my late twenties or early thirties. I don’t even know when exactly but those years just feel lost to me and I know I can’t get them back. How do we—?”

“We’re still aging a little,” Jaylen says. “In some ways.” She shifts in her chair, turning to face Dreamy, then lifts a hand, hesitant, to press her thumb gently between Dreamy’s eyebrows. She smooths out the furrow that’s been there since—Dreamy doesn’t know when. It wasn’t there in the first season. The years passed. By the time season seven was up, it was carved into her brow as if by a blade. There’s grey starting to come in at her temples too, she knows. Stress responses. Her bones ache. Her muscles ache. The in-between places where old crabshell meets skin ache. Her heart aches. 

“Not aging,” Dreamy murmurs, runs her thumbnail over her sweatshirt’s hem again. Doesn’t meet her gaze. “Just decaying, right?” 

“Hey, don’t.” Jaylen’s thumb trips over Dreamy’s brow, hand coming to rest on her cheek, a familiar weight, and Dreamy lets her eyes flicker up to her face again. “We’re still—y’know. We’re still alive. You’re not, I dunno, decaying or deteriorating or rotting or whatever. I’m not either.” She might believe that, might not. But she’s at least trying to comfort her, and that means something, so Dreamy tilts her face into Jaylen’s hand. 

Other than the pair of ashen-grey streaks in her hair, one for each death, she looks the same as she did the day they met. The same dark eyes and freckles and sharp nose, the same curls framing her face, the same scar on her lip, the same half-there smile. It’s been fifteen years since that early morning in San Francisco. Maybe. Dreamy really couldn’t say for certain, and she feels no urge to cut them in half to check. 

“It feels like I’m just waiting,” Dreamy says. “I don’t even know what for.”

(For the Crabs to come home, for her family lost but not lost enough to move on, for the stars in the telescope to say hello back. For the games to start again. For a new god to kill, a new corpse to hollow out. For a new body in the bay. For her own death, for the third death of the woman she loves, for the knife that strikes only where she never expects it. For the world to burn down anew.) 

Jaylen shrugs, wordless for once, and pulls her closer. She leans awkwardly over the overlapped arms of the camp chairs and reaches out for her, and Dreamy lets her, tucks her face into the neckline of Jaylen’s sweatshirt. Smells like woodsmoke and not much else. She curls into her arms anyway, breathes deep. 

“Probably gonna be waiting a while,” Jaylen mumbles into her hair. 

Dreamy snorts, rueful, and closes her eyes. “I’ve gotten good at that. Not the most encouraging thing you could have said there, though, Jay.” 

Jaylen barks out a too-loud laugh, then turns her head to press a kiss to her temple. “God, that really fucking wasn’t. I—look, what I’m trying to say is I’ll wait with you. I always will.” 

“You’d better,” Dreamy mutters, and Jaylen laughs again. It’s an uncomfortable position, wrapped up in each other with her ribs digging into the arms of the chairs and neck tensed to keep herself where she is, but Jaylen doesn’t move so she doesn’t either. The fire burns on beside them, and neither of them flinch. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! you can find me on tumblr @fourteenthidol, and if you'd like to leave a comment that'd mean a lot! <3


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